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Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. Wikimedia/Alphamouse. Creative commons.No
adjective is more abused in the endorsement of contemporary art than ‘radical’,
but this is the rare creation to which the word applies. The Berlin memorial has
raised eyebrows from the day of its inauguration in 2005.

Its site houses
2711 concrete rectangles, identical in depth (2.38m) and width (.95m), creating
a criss-cross of public walkways. We find a field of nameless, faceless, industrially
manufactured coffins – funerary sites for victims who were denied burials
because they were denied existence as humans. The blocks also recall the
vacuously modernist rank and file of barracks housing inmates systematically worked,
beaten, starved, and gassed to death.

The blocks differ in one respect
only – in height, ranging from 0.2 to 4.7m. That meek residue of non-conformity
allows each slab to heave its own, perpetually futile, gasp of individuality.

The Berlin memorial
is not a museum, but an open space. It draws in visitors from around the world.
The only people barred are those who bar themselves by deliberately avoiding it,
studiously avoiding its pauses and its silences.

Many unsuspecting tourists drift in
altogether clueless about what the space is. They at first assume it to be just
another spectacle of zany modern art.

But plenty
of others know exactly where they are.

‘Are these the most tasteless
selfies yet?’ demanded a 2014 Daily
Mailheadline, portraying what you’ll easily see there yourself: passers-by
gleefully hopping, skipping and jumping among the tombstones of genocide.

We witness the same scenes amidst
memorial landmarks in Auschwitz
or Sachsenhausen.
This, the visitors apparently surmise, counts as irony. We can only shudder
imagining a survivor returning to these sites to witness groups of tourists yawning,
giggling and texting away.

Perhaps the entire monument is a monumental
mistake? Perhaps it stands more as an insult than as a tribute to the Nazis’ ravenously
devoured victims?

Yet the designers anticipated those
responses from the outset. The memorial offers not a glimpse of facts, but a
glimpse of ourselves. It rejects the mode of the conventional museum display. It
rejects the assumption of the visitor as a passive spectator. If there’s one
thing the message of the Holocaust can never easily abide, it’s the passive
spectator. The memorial interrogates the visitor. Only one ‘fact’ about the
Holocaust is ever on display: your secret responses.

As time passes, some of those tourists
may glance back at their jolly mementos. If that time should come, they may ask
themselves: ‘What were we doing? Why did we allow ourselves to behave that way?’

Those are the only questions a genocide
memorial can put to us. What were we doing? Why did we allow ourselves to
behave that way?

The memorial’s architect Peter
Eisenman knew, of course, that the less dignified responses, starting with sheer
frivolity, would soon stray into bleaker terrain. For years the shrine, although
altogether repelling some antisemites, has magnetically attracted others. And their
cleverness is breathtaking: ‘This place honours Jews. So let’s do just the opposite.’

Enter a prize specimen, Alain
Soral, erstwhile leftist filmmaker turned far-right antisemite. No sooner had we
discovered the quenelle,
that infamous Nazi salute oh-so ingeniously repackaged as ‘anti-establishment
rather than anti-Semitic’, than do we find Soral duly shuffling off to
Berlin to perform it.

Guess where?

Soral beams with that fatuous
self-seriousness matched only by a Heinrich Himmler surveying the masses of
nameless, faceless sheep ecstatically braying at Nuremberg rallies. The quenelle first achieved global fame with
Dieudonné
M’bala M’bala, another one-time leftist entertainer, later Soral’s partner
in a French political group that calls itself the ‘Anti-Zionist Party’. As long as
it’s ‘only’ about Zionism, so the mantra goes, then it has ‘nothing at all’ to
do with Jews. Disturbing numbers of Jews themselves believe that fairy tale. We
like the story that keeps the world simple.

Footballer Nicolas Anelka later
publicly enacted the quenelle. Anelka defended the gesture even after being
loudly advised of its antisemitic meaning. (We generously assume here that Anelka
had been, errrm, unaware of that meaning beforehand). Anelka later apologised –
out of concern for a comfortable career and reputation, and not because the tedious
memory of a bunch of Jewish Holocaust victims was haunting his good night’s rest.

Soral has since faced penalties
and has been condemned
by organisations fighting anti-Semitism, including Licra in France and Get the Trolls Out in Europe. As it
happens, I do not favour such penalties as a legal matter. But that’s a separate
debate. The question for now is: How comfortable are we with a memorial that
ends up supplying the perfect backdrop for every piddling antisemite with the brains
to operate a mobile phone?

In the end, however, such a question
has little to do with the Berlin memorial. That site is no more vulnerable to acts
of desecration than any other monument. It’s the risk we run when we build them.
The Berlin monument was conceived to embrace desacralising acts as part of its universe,
as part of our universe. It avoids idealising the act of collective memory by wishing
those acts away. It’s all too easy to freeze our Holocaust memory into an eternal
yesterday. It’s less convenient to confront Judeophobia today.

By including acts of defilement into
its self-conception, the Berlin monument remains the most resilient in
repelling them. After all, it had never promised to symbolise anything – except
us.

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